Episode 7: They Tried to Break Me

Survivors share their deepest and darkest memories from their time at Provo Canyon School.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The following episode contains disturbing and graphic accounts of survivor experiences.
It may not be suitable for younger audiences. Please listen
with care. I remember one time in particular, there was
a friend of mine at the facility and it was
a holiday, I want to say it was Halloween, and

(00:24):
our parents were allowed to send us one shoe box
of candy and we could just eat as much as
we could. But the rule was is that we could
eat as much as candy as we wanted to, but
we couldn't make ourselves sick or that was considered self mutilation,
and then we would lose all of our points and
it would be devastating. But we were still so excited
to have this box of candy. And I remember it

(00:46):
was towards the end of the night and one of
my friends and my family had gotten a demerit that
she felt was really unfair and she was upset about it.
And so staff members had this tendency to really escalate
a situation. So you would have someone who was upset,
and instead of sympathizing with that person, what they would

(01:07):
actually do is they would start to stack on demerits
and consequences when that person was already in a heightened
state of feeling frustrated, and so it would make anyone
to feel like they were being backed into a corner.
So it would be like, Okay, you've got one demerit.
Now that's two demerits. Now you've got three demerits. And
you're you're mentally being a child there. You're seeing the

(01:30):
amount of time that that's attacking on to you being
at the facility, that's preventing you from getting home. So
it sends anyone into that spiral. And I remember her
taking her water bottle and she threw it down on
the ground and she screamed out and she said, I'm
sick of this. And right in that moment, the dorm

(01:52):
mom at the time is what they called them at
our facility, the dor mom picked up her radio and
she said, backup staff to room three, backup staff to
room three. And you could hear just the thundering footsteps
of male staff members as they came up the stairs
into our classroom across the hallway and immediately tackled this

(02:14):
young girl to the ground. And it's one of the
most traumatizing memories that I have is we were actually
not allowed to look at things like this when it happened,
and so you could only hear it, which oftentimes is
even more excruciating. Lee traumatic is just hearing the noise

(02:36):
of your friend hit the ground, hearing the noise of
her shoe box full of candy get dumped everywhere, and
hearing these men as they smashed her face into the ground.
And immediately we were all expected to evacuate, and we did,

(02:57):
but even as we walked down the hallway, you could
still or her screaming from that room, and she'd be screaming,
get off of me, get off of me, Stop touching me,
Stop touching. And I think back to moments like that,
and I think about how how violent and how unnecessary

(03:21):
that is, and what a violation to this young woman
was clearly upset um and all of that could have
been avoided. Welcome back to another episode of Trapped in Treatment,

(03:57):
the show that examines one team treatment for city each season.
I'm your host, Rebecca Mellinger, and I'm Caroline Cole, one
troubled teen industry survivor and one investigator on a mission
to expose the truth of an industry plagued by controversy
and to make sure that no child has to experience
the hell that is teen treatment. So over the past

(04:19):
few episodes, we've revealed the history of PCs and its founders,
Robert christ Jack Williams, and Eugene Thorn. We learned the
origins of the Troubled Teen industry and how it transformed
from a federal initiative to keep kids out of prison
into a multimillion dollar industry that disregards the very children
it's tasked with caring for, all for the sake of

(04:40):
the bottom line. Over the next few episodes, we are
going to hear how the tactics used by staff to manipulate, isolate,
and punish vulnerable youth creates lifelong trauma. But today we
will hear from the survivors. This episode may be difficult
to listen to at times. We want to warn our
listeners and a specially any survivors listening, please listen with

(05:03):
care and take care of yourself. Pause, stop, skip, Only
those that have lived it can understand it. The traumatizing
experience of living in this tense, distrustful environment where the
children are treated like prisoners and the staff act as guards.
The story I shared at the beginning of this episode

(05:23):
is one of the most visceral experiences I have of
my time in the program. Every survivor that I have
spoken to has those moments in their treatment that has
stayed with them. Seventeen years later, I am still haunted
by those memories, from different decades to different links of stay.

(06:03):
Certain things never changed. Over medication, physical torture, students alienated
and abused by staff. These are the stories that keep
coming up. If the goal is to rehabilitate these kids,
then why does so much of what they experience seem
meant to break them. Today we bear witness to just

(06:24):
a few of the alleged atrocities committed at the hands
of the staff at PCs. When Dian O'Hara was born,
he had no clue what life would entail. He was

(06:46):
born a healthy baby, only to be struck with cerebral
palsy after a head injury at the age of three.
The disability would haunt his youth. Though he only had
a mild form, he still bore the brunt of being different.
At the time. I'm in the late nineteen eighties, the
disability rights movement had not yet struck and people were
often very cruel bullying was the norm and could be

(07:08):
relentless for the more vulnerable. And I was kind of
like a class clown up until like seventh grade, right,
but then people were starting to make fun of me, right,
and then I got really angry. And now it just
kind of skips cool because people would be like really
exceptionally cool, and like they would want to fight me
because I was disabled that they made front of me,

(07:31):
called me a retard and yeah, homeo phobic slurs, all
that kind of things, And so I was just really angry.
Did your mom know that this kind of bullying was
going on in your life? I don't think. I don't
know how much she knew, you know. One day, he

(07:55):
and his friends decided to skip a class. They went
to one of the boys mom's boyfriend houses in drink
BlackBerry schnops. It was Dean's first time really getting drunk.
This is the incident that would get him sent away.
He was sent to pro Volcanian School, where he would
stay for six months. He was fourteen years old. I

(08:16):
was an abducted a night, but my mom took me
the Utah. So can you tell me about just like um,
the first part of your experience their pro Volcanian school. Well,
they had the first phase and they were like the blues,
like bowling, like continued right, it was falling going, and
no one did anything about that. It wasn't long until

(08:38):
I ended up in the I don't even know what
they called it. You're probably from where they would send
you for punishment. OBBS was the observation observational placement in
the investment unit. OBBS was a small room with no
windows to the outside. This is where Dean would spend
a lot of his time. And then that was really

(09:01):
what they would do, is like do you would I
was there for at least weeks and probably months, and
like to get out of your time, you had to
like stand still for like hours, like an hour and
like and like, yeah, I am with my disability. That

(09:22):
was a really difficult thing to do. Standing for hours
was a common punishment, often for hours on end, spread
out over weeks and months. For the average individual, it
was extremely difficult and abusive. But for Dean, who had CP,
a condition that affects motor skills, the punishment was especially cruel.

(09:43):
Do you remember how Provo treated your disability while you
were there? Well, people would, uh would would Bowie me
all the time, and like nothing was really done about that,
and I think for the most part was non acknowledged.
But STA and I remember thinking at that time, I

(10:05):
just had to be angry and I just have to
fight it, liked you know, I just had to always
be angry, or else I'd be taking advantage of Courtney knapastics.
Seven months at PCs were a blur. It was two
thousand seven. The staff at PCs were barely trained, far

(10:27):
from medical professionals. I have a d h D depression. UM.
I was told that I was misdiagnosed as bipolar for
a while, but I don't think it really mattered what
you're diagnosis was. If you ever like sad one day
or like too happy, because you know teenage girls and emotions, UM,

(10:51):
they would just be like, Okay, we're gonna try something
new with your medication. Almost everyone was on medication. There
was a psychiatry is there who UM we'd meet with
once in a while and he was a part of
our treatment team, UM, and he would make those decisions.

(11:12):
I know a lot of girls they're got put on
Sarah Quill. Sarah will is a powerful and a psychotic
that can be dangerous when taken for extended periods of time.
And I remember him telling me he wanted me to
be on that, and I had been on it when
I was a little younger, and I told them like,
I don't want to be on it, like it made
me fat. When I said it made me fat, it

(11:33):
didn't matter how it made me feel like, he was like, oh, okay,
that's fine, Yeah, we don't want to put you on that.
Then Courtney would be put on many different medications during
her stay. They would make her behavior unpredictable. I couldn't
sleep for days at a time, Like I would just
sit in my bed and like stare at the bed
above me, like, can't sleep, eyes wide open. I remember

(11:56):
them thinking I was like on drugs, which I mean
I was um because my eyes were so dilated. One
day they were like, are you sneaking something? And I
haven't been outside in months, Like where am I getting drugs?
I'm sorry, but that's how like hopped up they had us.
There was no girl who wasn't taking medication there. The

(12:20):
use of medication or over medication is a common theme
we hear from most of the survivors we talked to
students with no previous diagnosis would be given large amounts
of psychotropic medications day after day. Natalia Dominguez arrived at
Provo in we heard her transport story in episode two.
Her first time in, she would watch with terrified eyes

(12:43):
as girls around her were injected, going limp within seconds.
The most commonly used drugs held all in antipsychotic, used
to treat schizophrenia. When given in great enough quantities, it
causes extreme sedation and overall lethargy that can last for weeks.
The kids the booty juice. What is booty juice? Um?

(13:04):
Booty juice is a drug they inject into you to
knock you out. I've never had that injected to me,
but I've seen other people just straight up knocked out.
That's why I was too scared to ever act out
or to ever defend myself. Because if you were blocked
in seclusion literally a cement box with no back room,

(13:29):
they had locks on them. That was like terrifying to
me that they could just lock you in the room
for however long they wanted in, or that they could
call the nurse to inject you with a drug. Those
drugs are really strong and they handed it out like
candy locked in alone with no clothes and no idea

(13:52):
when you would get out. The combination of medication and
isolation was mental tyranny, the complete loss of self control
to outside forces. The subject of sexuality was in sharp
focus and the single gender dorms. If you were discovered
to be gay, or even exploring your sexuality, you often

(14:14):
faced extra discipline. Remnants of Dr Eugene Thorne's anti lgbt
Q attitudes could still be seen even decades later. So
I realized I was gay there, um, because I've met
this girl. Courtney tried to hide it for a bit.
She was from small town Illinois and didn't know anyone

(14:36):
that was gay before she arrived at Provo. She eventually
worked up the courage to tell her parents it was
a big decision, but when the day came, it didn't
go as she thought it would. They had definitely gotten
heads up from staff, um, which I felt really robbed
at that moment, Like tell my parents something really big

(14:58):
because they guessed what I was trying to say, which
sweet at them to like help me get it out,
but it was to giveaway that there someone already told
them for me that I was confused about my sexuality,
not that I might be gay, it was like a
little confused about it. The chance to own her coming

(15:20):
out to family was ruined. Her parents seemed supportive but
didn't say much in the short call left Courtney upset
and I'm like, yeah, I don't know if my family
it's okay with this, Like it was a really short
phone call, and they were like, well, they probably need time,
because I would need time and like need you to

(15:43):
be here if that was my child. So I ended
up trying to hang myself in the bathroom that same day,
and um, it was my roommate who actually stopped me. Uh.
She watched me grab my belts out of um my structure,

(16:06):
which is just a dresser, and walk into the bathroom
and it was like ten o'clock at night, so I
don't really need those, um, and I was going to
use like the towel rack, the only metal thing attached
to the wall. That yeah, and um, she opened the

(16:27):
bathroom door almost immediately and stopped me and saved my life.

(16:48):
Stripped of their dignity and individuality, the kids quickly lose
any sense of control. They can't trust the staff who
are instructed to consider them deserving of their punishment. They
can't trust each other. This creates a loss of perception
of self, a dissociation with what is really happening. We've

(17:09):
all heard of the Stanford Prison experiment if you haven't,
It was a social experiment in ninety one that pit
faux guards and prisoners against each other in a realistic
prison environment. It was shut down after only six days
due to increasing mental anguish and abuse amongst the volunteers.

(17:29):
Phillips Simbardo, who was the key researcher, conducted tons of
research on de humanization, examining how easily people could be
led to commit antisocial acts. He found that when given
a position of power in a certain amount of anonymity,
people became increasingly more abusive. The study concluded that humans

(17:51):
are very susceptible to obedience, and if you can create
a perception of the individual ation non identity, the easier
it is to obtaining that obedience. Things like strip searching
and assigning numbers rather than names is meant to create
a great riff between the sides. One is protected and powerful,
the other vulnerable and undeserving. Pair that with guards who

(18:14):
are actually unfit for the place of power, paid minimally
for their time or even traumatized by their own trauma,
and you get an escalating and unhealthy environment for growth.
It's a vicious cycle created by the situational environment. Similarities
between these historic experiments and the environment at PCs are striking.

(18:34):
The staff at provo or the guards, the kids are
the subjects, and because the staff is also usually so young,
so untrained, they eventually become drunk with power. I mean,
it's it's a lot of uneducated staff. We're just kind
of like they don't have their their college students outsides,
and they don't really have a lot of control. But
over here they're like they pretty much rule everybody's life.

(18:56):
Some of them are like good people. Some of them
just kind of got runk on it, like you could tell.
I mean, Provocated School had a lot wrong with it,
Like like I saw people taken down like and restrained
for like bs reasons. I saw takedowns that were done
really painfully on purpose. Like I saw people dragged to
obbs and just left there for like weeks. There's this

(19:17):
one time, like, um so, this this girl on my caseload,
she was there, she had really bad PTSD from an
earlier rape, and you know, like because the staff were
just so untrained and stuff like when she would have flashbacks,
like I tried to calm her down from a panic
attack and they punish her for it, like they throw
her in odds, and I just remembered her like screaming

(19:38):
all night long. I was older, and I understood things
a little bit more, and I understood how messed up,
like treating people like that have these kind of issues
like that was. And you know, um, I knew how
to stay out of trouble better because I was older,
But like I remember just being so angry at like
some of the stuff I would see and like how

(19:58):
unjust it was, or how like some of the staff
would just target people they didn't like or decided that
they were faking like serious medical problems or like PTSD
responses or some things like that because they like they
hired these like people who are either in college or
just like you know, younger, and they didn't understand like

(20:19):
like psychological stuff at all. I witnessed one of the
staff being trained and like one of the older staff
are telling or like remember these kids are like criminals.
They're likely here because they're criminals. You have to treat
them with like anything they say is with a grain
of sand. They're probably trying to manipulate you, just as
some prisoners in the Stanford Prison Experiment were rewarded and

(20:41):
separated for being good. Kids, a PROVO are controlled by
a level system, one that determines their entire experience. Staff
would turn the kids against each other by encouraging them
to tell on and police each other to earn points.
Any sense of community is quickly abolished. Paid a minimal
living wage only a few years older than the kids

(21:01):
they're guarding, the staff must quickly view the kids as
objects in order to maintain control. So what is the
solution barring shutting down PROVO completely? I called James Gordon,
the author of Transforming Trauma and the creator of the
Center for Mind Body Medicine. The staff has to be trained,

(21:23):
and staff has to be trained. The training that we
do with staff and institutions is giving them the tools
to deal with their own issues, giving them the tools
to deal with their own stress, their own anxiety, their
own anger and depression, and then helping them not to
project it on or take it out on the people
with whom they're working to see, this is my stuff

(21:46):
coming up here, my need for control, my anxiety about
your anger, my fear of your suffering, or your loud voice.
So that kind of training has to be in every
one of these facilities, and and the leadership has to
buy into it and has to be trained as well. Absolutely.

(22:08):
And so now what we just saw we passed alow
in Utah recently, and uh, the requirements for staff. The
training requirements for staff was that they were required to
take first aid and they were required to take some
kind of training on physical restraint. And so it baffled

(22:30):
me because I thought, what is the message that we're
sending the staff. We have to keep them alive, and
we have to keep them under our control. And that
is the only message that they are getting as they
cut go onto the floor of sometimes um a psychiatric
unit where where it can feel very explosive or out
of control. So I just love that you mentioned that

(22:51):
sense of mindfulness and self control for the staff themselves.
And I think that the staff also are going to
feel more supportive it in that way and actually be
able to do their jobs in a way that is
not detrimental to them or to the kids. I couldn't
agree with you more. They They will be much happier,

(23:12):
they'll do their jobs, will be much more meaningful. They
won't feel guilty and ashamed as many of them do.
They justify it, they have to rationalize it. But I
know from talking to staff in mental hospitals as well
as talking staff in prisons, that they often feel very
bad about what they're doing. Provo's culture was built on

(23:33):
methods that are now antiquated and cruel, a facility that
evolved during some of the most controversial times in psychology.
Vanessa Hughes, the acting director of Breaking Code Silence, thinks
the line between evidence based treatment and the techniques of
the twenty century are blurred and need to be cleared up.
I think one of the slippery things with this industry
is what it even is, right Like, there's almost like

(23:55):
there's two routes ors, either behavior modification or its therapy,
and it tends to do both at the same time.
So if we if we take one path, right, okay,
it's it's behavior modification. Kids were naughty parents and know
what to do. UM, they need to send their kids away.
Never mind that that goes against all current research. UM

(24:17):
but kids need to get sent away and they go
to behavior modification programs. They're in a facility, they have
to earn privileges, they have levels that's not being able
to make eye contact, talk, have relationships, get a hug. Right,
Those are necessary elements of human development. Those are necessary

(24:37):
for our brain to actually grow and develop in the
way that it's supposed to. So using kind of a
pure behaviorist of you do this and then you get
a reward, you don't get a punishment, right, um dog
contrainers don't even use that your behaviorist model anymore. The
other route is may to be mental health treatment. If

(24:58):
a youth has a diagnosis that is requiring them to
have in patient treatment that's a year long. If we
pause for a second, and if you were to think
of your um and uncle Samuel, who needs to go
to an inpatient facility for a year, just imagine the
kinds of diagnoses or the symptoms that you're imagining for

(25:20):
someone who would have to be inpatient for a year.
This is not typically what we're seeing with you in
these programs. Close to six thousand therapeutic hours over the
course of the year for a minor who is in
congregate care. UM. I don't know of any research that
would document a protocol for what new year, six thousand

(25:42):
therapeutic hours would look like for the treatment of depression.
In these programs implement this milieu therapy, which is really
learning how to do a day in this false environment right,
being able to wake up, do the chores, do the thing,
go through the day in a way that there are
no um, no issues. UM. This is not a typical environment.

(26:10):
This isn't how we're made to be right. So these
kids go through this, learn, adapt, do whatever. It's not
really targeting assumptems. It's really targeting how to make these
children compliant. They try to break them. The students that

(26:33):
come through the door. Rather than help with mental health
or self esteem issues, they're shamed and abused. In line
with the psychology of conditioning. Provocanion takes an anequated approach
to treatment therapy through force, and while many students are
able to go on and live full lives, not all do.
The question I so often here is why don't you

(26:55):
just tell someone? Why didn't you just tell your parents?
And while the question is easy, the answer is actually
much more methodical because in a world where lines are
tapped and letters are read. There's no such thing as
a letter home Next time on trapped in treatment. If you,

(27:35):
or anyone who knows thinking about harming themselves, reach out
to the Trevor Project for support. The Trevor Project is
the world's largest suicide prevention and crisis intervention organization. For
l g B, t q I A plus youth connect
to a crisis council three and sixty five days a
year from anywhere in the US. It's one confidential and
a hundred percent free text start to six seven eight

(27:58):
six seven eight or recall eight six six four eight
eight seven three eight six to hear a live voice
on the other line. You're not alone.